Alaskan Range: Globish
"The author, Nick Patrick, said “Americans in 1776 did have British accents, in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged.” However, “those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than today’s British accents … it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically,'' writes librarian and columnist Greg Hill.
Our public library owns a huge selection of DVD movies that can be borrowed for free for seven days. That’s an important detail if you check out “The Way West,” a cornucopia of terrible westerns so bad they’re amusing and doling them out over a week is necessary to maintaining a happy marriage. Clare and I viewed “Battles of Chief Pontiac” at my urging, since Pontiac was portrayed by Lon Chaney, Jr., whose artistic range was amusingly tested by the role. The Great Lakes setting looked suspiciously like southern California, and the cast and script were equally authentic.
The delightfully dreadful movie reminded me of an online article I read that answered the question: “Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?” The author, Nick Patrick, said “Americans in 1776 did have British accents, in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged.” However, “those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than today’s British accents … it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically.”
Patrick points out that today’s British, “the standard Received Pronunciation, also known as BBC English,” is a non-rhotic language. “Received Pronunciation,” according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is “the standard accent of English spoken in the south of England,” and non-rhotic speakers “do not pronounce the letter ‘r’ after vowels in words like ‘world.’ They do pronounce it before a vowel.” Patrick noted that in the 1770s it became fashionable among the British upper classes to speak non-rhotically, and that led to the great divergence in today’s pronunciations.
Looking up “rhotic” on a great online dictionary site, www.OneLook.com, allows you to search over 900 online dictionaries simultaneously, including my favorite, the American Heritage. It’s customizable and includes an excellent tutorial-at-a-glance on how to phrase different types of searches. “Snow*,” for example, finds words and phrases that start with “snow,” and “*:snow,” finds words related to “snow.”
My tremendous respect for the talented people behind reliable dictionaries has grown throughout my lengthy career in libraries. That ought to irritate any British readers, because in a recent BBC News article titled “Why Do Some Americanisms Irritate People?,” the words “lengthy,” “reliable,” “talented,” and “tremendous” were examples of “words we use without a second thought” that were once reviled in polite British society and “were never a part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.”
The article’s author said, “The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here.” In comparison, the “French have always hated this process with a very Gallic passion, and their most august body, L’Acadamie Francaise issues regular rulings on the avoidance of imported words.”
“English isn’t like that,” the BBC article continues. “It is a far more flexible language” that “triumphed where Latin, French, and the artificial language Esperanto all ultimately failed, and became the natural medium of global communication. This is a version of English sometimes known as ‘Globish.’ To use it requires only a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and … a vocabulary of a mere 1,500 words.”
Wikipedia says “Globish is a subset of the English language formalized by Jean-Paul Nerriere” using a list of 1500 English words as “a common ground that non-native English speakers adopt in the context of international business.” Nerriere was an international marketing VP for IBM when he “first observed patterns of English that non-native English speakers used to communicate with each other in international conferences,” and he went on to author two Globish handbooks.
Being a simple country librarian with non-rhodic tendencies, my foreign language ability and confidence are feeble things at best. Fortunately, mastering a few crucial words before traveling, “yes” and “no,” “food” and “toilet,” and “thank you” and “I’m sorry,” along with an open heart and smile seem to cover most of the bases necessary for survival.
Communicating effectively, as Lon Chaney, Sr. described it, is “an art, but not magic.”
